Today, George Will annoyed me

Will can be annoying when he pushes the party line. The time he absolutely cannot be annoying is when he writes on baseball. Today's column, Declaration of Dependence, he is pushing a party line. True, he is also reviewing a book but he makes no or little distinctions between the book and his own views.

Mr. Will starts rehashing history. Or bits of history, I should say.

The Depression's persistence, partly a result of such policy flippancy, was frightening. In 1937, during the depression within the Depression, there occurred the steepest drop in industrial production ever recorded. By January 1938 the unemployment rate was back up to 17.4 percent. The war, not the New Deal, defeated the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt's success was in altering the practice of American politics.

Yes, it was frightening. I had a grandmother who was 39 years old in 1937 and one of her daughters was 14 that year (for the curious, my own mother was only 4 years old ). The Great Depression engendered a fear that never left them.

What Mr. Will introduces as a startling discovery - the New Deal - did not solve the Great Depression, has always been known even if the myth exists that the New Deal solved the Great Depression. Mr. Will omits that the New Deal dying in 1937. (I did not understand this until I read Robert Jackson' book, The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy: A Study of a Crisis in American Power Politics.)

Mr. Will does mention the court packing scheme:

In 1938, when the New Deal's failure to spark recovery made Roosevelt increasingly frantic, he attempted to enlarge the Supreme Court so he could pack it with compliant justices. He said Americans had the right to "insist that every agency of popular government" respond to "their will." He included the court among "popular," meaning political and representative, institutions.

Perhaps, Mr. Will assumes his fellow Americans recall their history lessons. The United States Supreme Court consistently struck legislation implementing the idea that the United States was an economic unity. Now, the United States Supreme Court had had no problem with this concept when Congress sought to protect the railroads from local regulation. Mr Wills' sentence turns about the causal sequence when he has the failing of the New Deal leading to FDR attacking the Supreme Court. The sequence actually should go like this: the court kept striking down New Deal legislation, the removal of legislation was held as impeding the New Deal proposal, the court packing bill was proposed and then the firestorm broke out. This Wikipedia article has a chronology.

I would suggest that Mr. Will would not disagree that the United States Supreme Court should not ignore the popular will in such areas of gun control and abortion. I feel more certain that his fellow travelers in the conservative movement would think the Court has erroneously ignored the public will.

He finally gets to the book and its thesis in these paragraphs:

Republicans had long practiced limited interest-group politics on behalf of business with tariffs, gifts of land to railroads and other corporate welfare. Roosevelt, however, made interest-group politics systematic and routine. New Deal policies were calculated to create many constituencies -- labor, retirees, farmers, union members -- to be dependent on government.

Before the 1930s, the adjective "liberal" denoted policies of individualism and individual rights; since Roosevelt, it has primarily pertained to the politics of group interests. So writes Shlaes, a columnist for Bloomberg News, in " The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression." She says Roosevelt's wager was that, by furiously using legislation and regulations to multiply federally favored groups, and by rhetorically pitting those favored by government against the unfavored, he could create a permanent majority coalition.

Which leads me to the view that author and her reviewer only dislike the politics of group interests when they are groups they favor. Surely Mr. Will knows how the federal government supported business at the time of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 or the Andaconda Strike? Why would some listeners think of themselves as forgotten men?

In the process, says Shlaes, Roosevelt refined his definition of the "forgotten man." This man had been thought of as a general personality, compatible with the assumption that Americans were all in it together. "Now, by defining his forgotten man as the specific groups he would help, the president was in effect forgetting the rest -- creating a new forgotten man. The country was splitting into those who were Roosevelt's favorites and everyone else."

Mr. Will does not tell us Ms. Shlaes' groups. I assume farmers and factory workers and perhaps even military veterans.

Another thing is apparent in these paragraphs: the lack of context. First, no one had any experience in dealing with a crisis such as the Great Depression but there were ideas floating about. Second, those ideas had found credence with certain people in certain places and were gaining political credence. Among those ideas floating about the political sphere were such international ideas as Communism, Socialism, National Socialism, and Fascism. Domestic ideas included Huey Long's Share the Wealth plan.

The United States avoided the clashes between Communists and the Fascists/National Socialists as seen in France and England and Germany and Spain. I suggest keeping a liberal capitalist society functioning when anti-capitalist forces were offering rather attractive alternatives (for those that are not aware - both Fascism and Nazism are anti-capitalist political movements) merits a great deal of praise. I would go so far as to suggest that managing the change from a government backing the plutocrats to a government supporting all its citizens is the true legacy of FDR. Certainly, it is the part of the New Deal that its opponents go without mentioning and have spent so much energy since 1964 in reversing.

When a nation has a large number of unemployed people without hope and there are those willing to fan hopelessness into action, I suggest that the complaints about FDR's hyper-activity
are taken out of context. When put into context, a government not acting would have been not merely hapless but helpless against its competitors. Weimar fell from (among other things ) such haplessness but even before that Mussolini came to power in Italy. Remember Benito got the trains running on time and his efficiency made Fascism an attractive temptation for those disenchanted with liberal democracy.

I do appreciate Mr. Will's mention of Wendell Willkie - local boy made good. However, in the same paragraph Mr. Will mentions Willkie, he finally mentions that a war was going on somewhere. The Second World War began in Europe on September 17, 1939 but does ignore the Spanish Civil War without any justification (I do overlook the Japanese invasion of China as the Japanese offered no political theory comparable to Nazism). The United States began its peacetime draft after September 16, 1940. Then comes Pearl Harbor, World War Two ends with a devastated Europe with a Soviet Union looming over it, and we cannot go home again.

If Mr. Will wants to find a Democratic President as a villain for his peace, I suggest Mr. Truman. Mr. Truman began what Gore Vidal calls the "National Security State" but I think that will not appeal to Mr. Will. For upon the structure of this National Security State came the means to fight the Cold War which once was the forefront of the Goldwater Republicans and now has been used to such an extreme point by President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney. I confess I find a government built upon compassion more attractive than one built upon the needs of a few to exercise power for the sake of exercising power.

I would have preferred Mr. Will not to have overlooked these historical points. His eliding of these points speaks to me more of a need to make a partisan point rather than a honestly intellectual one.